LONG BEACH – The good news for local officials on Thursday: California finally has a budget.

The bad news: Government agencies will continue to deal with funding cuts.

The California Legislature on Thursday voted to close an estimated $42 billion budget deficit through a mixture of spending cuts, tax increases and borrowing. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to sign the budget into law today.

Officials with local education institutions said that although they welcomed its passage, the budget doesn’t change the need for cuts.

“We are still getting all the details, but it doesn’t change the situation for community colleges, or Long Beach City College, too much,” said LBCC Superintendent-President Eloy Oakley.

The college expects to lose $4 million to $5 million this fiscal year and $5 million to $7 million in 2009-2010, he said.

To cut costs, LBCC has frozen most hiring, changed its summer school schedule and cut travel and mileage, he added. The cuts are expected to make it more difficult for students to get the classes they want, he added.

The California State University system expects to see a state funding reduction of at least $66 million in 2009-2010, said spokeswoman Clara Potes-Fellow.

Cal State Long Beach plans to enroll 1,500 fewer students next academic year and has reduced hiring to cope with cuts.

“It’s a bad budget year,” said CSULB President F. King Alexander. “And we’ll do the best with what we have.”

The Long Beach Unified School District is still examining details of the just-passed budget, said Robert Tagorda, assistant to the superintendent.

The district may send notices to about 46 employees next month warning them that they could be laid off at the end of the school year.

“We continue to be disappointed that education is the part of the budget that takes the biggest cuts, which reflects that education is not being looked at as a priority, which is sad,” he said.

“But if there is a silver lining, we now have a budget,” he added. “And it was well within the scope of what we figured would be coming out of the state.”

Tom Modica, the manager of government affairs for the city of Long Beach, said the state budget will impact the city’s health services and public safety funding. The good news is that the budget doesn’t rely on borrowing city revenues such as property taxes, he said.

“Every year we’re worried about the taking of our general fund money or taking of our redevelopment money,” Modica said. “In this year, that didn’t happen.

“The direct impacts are not nearly as severe on Long Beach as they could have been or as they have been in the past. But it’s such a difficult budget, everybody will feel the impact.”

City officials still need to examine the new budget to determine the exact effects, but public safety grants are expected to drop by 10percent, Modica said. That money – about $90,000 annually – funds police overtime for task forces, extra crime patrols and a variety of other special operations, he said.

How much funding the city’s Department of Health and Human Services will lose remains to be seen, Modica said.

With the budget’s passage, state infrastructure funding that had been frozen during the budget stalemate should be freed up again in the coming months for Long Beach to move forward on its projects, Modica said.

That amounts to almost $15.7 million of funding to complete $24.1million in projects, such as the Colorado Lagoon restoration, the Second Mortgage Assistance Program, construction of the California Recreation Teen Center and traffic light synchronization projects.

There also had been a fear that the budget crisis would prevent the federal stimulus package money from reaching California, Modica said.

“It is somewhat relieving that a budget is passed so that we can get back to some sense of normalcy,” Modica said.

Redevelopment Bureau Manager Amy Bodek said Thursday she had not yet looked at the newly passed state budget for additional impact to the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency, which is expected to shell out nearly $6.1 million into the Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund.

Last September, the governor signed Assembly Bill 1389, which mandates redevelopment agencies to shift property tax revenues to schools and community colleges through the fund.

The agency will make that payment, due by May 10, by borrowing about $1.2 million in housing set-aside funds and the rest from Low and Moderate Income Housing funds from the agency’s seven project areas, Bodek said.

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